Bodyspacemotionthings by Robert Morris at Tate Modern in 2009.
Photograph: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images

One of my favourite works by Robert Morris appears to be nothing more than a small wooden cube, a little less that 10 inches square. From inside come the muffled sounds of sawing, hammering and sanding. The title explains everything: Box With the Sound of its Own Making. Hidden inside is a small tape recorder, which Morris used to record his carpentry project in 1961. While my art school teachers insisted this was an artwork that interrogated the conditions of its own production, I always preferred to imagine that the artist was somehow in there, forever making a little box, and inside that there was another box and another even smaller carpenter, and so on – an infinity of hidden carpenters making ever smaller boxes.

Robert Morris, pioneering minimalist sculptor, dies aged 87

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Later, in 1965, Morris made four mirrored cubes, each three feet square, that reduplicate themselves in reflection, and mirror and trap and multiply us as we walk around and between them. The objects themselves are less the point than our own relationship to them. Morris made minimalism a kind of performance. In 1971, the year I went to art school, Morris held a show at London’s Tate gallery. Rather than filling the Duveen sculpture court with a retrospective, he built wooden ramps, gantries, slides, see-saws and other wood and steel structures which visitors were invited to play on. Even at the private view the gallery’s decorum, and the work Morris had installed, began to break down. Reyner Banham, writing in the New York Times, called it “the most resoundingly successful disaster I have ever attended”, going on to describe the private view as a kind of bedlam in which “liberated aesthetes leaped and teetered and heaved and clambered and shouted and joined hands with total strangers”. The show was closed four days after its opening.

Tate never repeated or invited this kind of participatory reaction until the slides and swings and sunsets of the various Turbine Hall projects at Tate Modern in the current millennium. For a long time, Morris’s show seemed to be something Tate wanted to forget, but in 2009 Morris’s 1971 show was recreated in the Turbine Hall.

‘More a choreography of materials than formal arrangements’ … a work by Robert Morris at the Guggenheim, New York. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

Eventually, art caught up with Morris who throughout the 1960s was a key figure of the New York downtown scene and as much involved in dance and performance as he was in making sculpture. Closely involved with the Judson Dance Theater, he had been married to dancer Simone Forti and later lived with Yvonne Rainer. In 1965 he created the work Site, in which he had the artist Carolee Schneemann posing as Manet’s Olympia, at first hidden behind a barricade of plain screens, which Morris hefts manfully around to first reveal, and then hide her again, all to the sound of roaring pneumatic drills. Morris himself wears a mask of his own face, made for the performance by Jasper Johns. In 1993, the great cinematographer Babette Mangolte restaged this and a number of other dance works by Morris in her film Four Pieces by Morris.

Aside from the Tate debacle, Morris got into deep water in 1974, when he appeared in a poster for his exhibition at New York gallery Castelli-Sonnabend. Naked from the waist up, Morris stares out at us from behind a pair of aviator sunglasses, wearing a Nazi-era helmet, a spiked metal collar and manacles, all joined by industrial-weight chains. His skin glistens, though whether this is baby oil or sweat I cannot tell. His hand clutches the chain, biceps bulging. A story circulates that this confrontational image of a hyper-masculine artist led to Lynda Benglis’s notorious advert the same year in the magazine Artforum. Also naked, Benglis poses in rhinestone sunglasses and lipstick, clutching a large, double-headed dildo between her legs. Rather than a feminist riposte to Morris, Benglis’s staged image was part of a larger conversation with Morris, with whom she had been collaborating in a number of video projects. Both Benglis and Morris’s images are performances of gender, of power and entitlement (or powerlessness, in Morris’s case, given the manacles and collar). Both images had a serious effect on my younger self. And on the not so young, too.

The objects themselves are less the point than our own relationship to them … Glass Labyrinth by Robert Morris in Rio de Janeiro, 2012. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Much of Morris’s work could be described as a performance. At the time of his 1971 Tate show Morris quipped: “I’d rather break my arm falling off a platform than spend an hour in detached contemplation of a Matisse.” But he also had a great feel for materials and the theatricality of making things, as well as performing. His works made with sliced up sheets of felt, which drooped, flopped, dangled, splayed and slumped are more a kind of choreography of materials than formal arrangements. Later, Morris’s art became more portentous, as he moved both into monumental outdoor commissions, and over-embellished, baroque paintings, replete with cast elements, and their imagery of firestorms, apocalypse and nuclear threat. He also started making new versions of earlier felt works and geometric sculptures. These may have prevented him from disappearing from view, but somehow the most vital and sometimes ephemeral aspects of his art were obscured by these replays.

Instead, I prefer the Morris who could recall the headier, more innocent times at the Judson, about which he commented: “I do not recall having seen at Judson any performers who were obese, lame, or old, and there were few non-white performers. Was there a slight sheen of forgivable narcissism glowing on those young, white, energetic types? Did the self-critical have much weight among the enthusiastic participants? Has a certain mythical ethos come to colour those innocent evenings? Well, it was before careers were made, dance companies formed, professions assumed, individual styles patented, iconic images fixed, histories sorted out and laid claim to. But all things considered, a good time seems to have been had by all.” I wish I could have been there.